How We Read Now : Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio

An engaging and authoritative guide to the impact of reading medium on learning, from a foremost expert in the field

We face constant choices about how we read. Educators must select classroom materials. College students weigh their textbook options. Parents make decisions for their children. The digital revolution has transformed reading, and with the recent turn to remote learning, onscreen reading may seem like the only viable option. Yet selecting digital is often based on cost or convenience, not on educational evidence. Now more than ever it is imperative to understand how reading medium actually impacts learning--and what strategies we need in order to read effectively in all formats.

In How We Read Now, Naomi Baron draws on a wealth of knowledge and research to explain important differences in the way we concentrate, understand, and remember across multiple formats. Mobilizing work from international scholarship along with findings from her own studies of reading practices, Baron addresses key challenges--from student complaints that print is boring to the hazards of digital reading for critical thinking. Rather than arguing for one format over another, she explains how we read and learn in different settings, shedding new light on the current state of reading. The book then crucially connects research insights to concrete applications, offering practical approaches for maximizing learning with print, digital text, audio, and video.

Since screens and audio are now entrenched--and invaluable-platforms for reading, we need to rethink ways of helping readers at all stages use them more wisely. How We Read Now shows us how to do that.

Naomi S. Baron is Professor of Linguistics Emerita at American University in Washington, DC. A Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and Fulbright Specialist, she has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Baron is author of Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (OUP 2015) and Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (OUP 2008).